vocation

As we progress through school we become clearer about what we’d like to do, the career we’d like to follow. That’s the theory anyway. Of course, circumstances choose for us and we seldom have our way. My father is an example.

I must ask him what he thought he might become after Wesley. One day the headmaster summons my father to his office and tells him to empty his locker. No explanation is offered and he is to go straight to his father’s office. My grandfather loses his staff to the war against Hitler and Japan. At 16 my father fills the breach and at 17 is himself on a cruiser in the Pacific.

After the war his father and accountancy choose him. He works first for his father, then with his brother in Warrnambool, where I am born, then again for his father when he falls out with his brother over a question of ethics, and then for himself, but always as an accountant.

For a time at school I think I might make an accountant of myself too. My mother determines that I am to be a forester, scientifically studying forests, not chopping them down. So, of course, I become a teacher, then a single father. And when both my children go to school I think I might have a librarian inside me, but RMIT begs to differ and suggests I consider something more interesting.

I never choose any subsequent job. They choose me or happen by accident. My friend Rock, the principal, asks me to fill in for five weeks at Berengarra. I stay seven years and take his place as principal. Billanook College asks me to spend an hour or two in their annexe: I run it for four years.

I apply for three jobs at EACH: working in AOD (alcohol and other drugs) chooses me. Then EACH needs someone to write the copy for their new website, so I become a writer, and editor, their publications officer.

After nine years I tell my daughter in Bendigo I’m done with EACH. A week later she tells me two jobs in Bendigo might suit me and I become the regional youth mentoring co-ordinator.  

“Everything happens for a reason,” says my former colleague, the spunky Ms Barnfield.

“No,” I shake my head in reply, “nothing happens for any reason whatsoever. The universe is utterly random.” And she looks at me as if I’ve completely lost it.

Life chooses what we do. We choose how we do what it chooses for us, how we do life.

Rock on.